Area ranks low among country's happiest cities

Tuesday

Feb 19, 2013 at 7:36 PM

A new study suggests Houma-Thibodaux has some of the unhappiest people in the country — among those on Twitter, anyway.

Chance RyanStaff Writer

A new study suggests Houma-Thibodaux has some of the unhappiest people in the country — among those on Twitter, anyway.The metro area, which includes all of Terrebonne and Lafourche parishes, ranks 10th lowest among 373 cities in the country in a study conducted by scientists from the University of Vermont that examined the emotions of the Twitterverse in 2011. They used a formula that quantifies the happiness of words and categorizes them by date, time and geography. Napa, Calif., topped the list as the happiest city.Louisiana, in a similar study, was ranked the saddest state overall based on relative differences in the frequencies of happy and sad words on Twitter from 2008 to 2011. Hawaii topped the list as the happiest state.The study looked at 10 million random geo-tagged tweets, or 80 million words, from Americans’ smartphones, researchers wrote in the scientific journal PLoS ONE. “Our overall objective is to use web-scale text analysis to remotely sense societal-scale levels of happiness using the singular source of the microblog and social networking service Twitter,” the study’s introduction says.Volunteers for the study rated the sense of happiness of the various words using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, a Web service that enables humans to help machines perform human tasks. “Laughter” got a high happiness score; “hate” a low one. Lewis Mitchell, lead author of the study and post-doctoral researcher with the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont, said the tweets accounted for about 10 percent of all geo-tweets posted in 2011.“Simply put, (the study) takes the words from those tweets, and it aims to produce an estimate of the average happy words in that city,” Mitchell said. For Houma, Mitchell said some of the words that contributed to the low happiness score include profanity and negative words such as “no,” “don’t,” “not” and “bad.” “This is not to say that Houma is going to be a terrible place to be and that it’s all going to be doom and gloom,” he said. “This is a representation of the type of words people are using on Twitter,” which may or may not be an indication of happiness in the city. A flaw with the study, Mitchell said, is the context in which some words are used. For instance, negative words used in a joke or for sarcasm may trigger a low score. “We deliberately strip away all the context of the tweets we looked at,” he said. “There is no meaning that we looked at. It is more like measuring temperature.”Mitchell said if researchers were going to give a one-number score to individual messages then the technique wouldn’t be useful.“It is only when we use hundreds of thousands of words that we start to find quantities that are more robust.”Though the study is interesting, it doesn’t hold much clout, said Dean Hickman, department of psychiatry chairman at the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans. It also directly contradicts a former study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which ranked Louisiana as the happiest state in the country in 2009, Hickman said.The happiness ratings were based on a four-year survey of 1.3 million people across the country by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that asked people how satisfied they are with their lives. The study indicated people who live in sunny, outdoorsy states — Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida — say they’re the happiest Americans. The study ranked New York last in happiness. “Houma’s Twitterverse in 2011 likely was impacted by the BP spill,” Hickman said. “Our climate, food, music and other aspects of our culture would counter this Twitter conclusion.” Lori Belanger, 28, of Houma, said the Twitter statistics are flawed.“Sure, we have tons of problems with education, health care and constructive activities,” she wrote on Facebook. “But who is mostly on Twitter? Youth, who think their life is over if they lose Internet privileges. In Houma, we face lots of adversity, but I see us as a happy place.”Belanger said local friends and family ties are strong, which contribute to people’s collective happiness in Houma.Mitchell agreed the study’s method is still “very crude,” but it’s coming along. “We are trying to quantify the unquantifiable,” he said. “The grand idea is to come up with some society-level metric with this tool that measures how happy or sad people are.”In the future, Mitchell wants to be able look at other groups of words people look at online such as news articles or other academic journals and gauge their emotions. “The interesting thing is looking beyond the one number and looking at the words that go into making up these scores,” he said. “You can learn a lot from interpreting data from big sources like this.”